Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes Sunday through Thursday with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

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17.7.14

McAllister manages to top whiners' stupid remarks

Looks as if an idiot magnet popped
up in Pineville, attracting a motley iron-headed bunch that wants to loot
Louisiana taxpayers and to discourage improved health care delivery even as
they have no hope of attaining their ultimate goal.

Last week, a gripe
session over the closure of the state’s Huey P. Long Medical Center was
sponsored by Pineville Concerned Citizens, which has a history not only of pushing
leftist causes but also of flouting
Internal Revenue Service regulations. Heartened by a state
district court ruling that the closing violated open meetings law, even as
the court allowed the closing to proceed at the end of June, many participants clamored
for reopening the facility regardless of consequences to taxpayers and clients.

While it’s been only a couple of
weeks since the hospitals functions have been farmed out to other local
providers and with plans to have some medical care delivered by other providers
on the site in a smaller footprint, the sane people involved discussed ways how
to preserve the three-quarter-century-old facility and to find incentives to put
it into use again. By contrast, the wackos present pledged in different ways to
restore some semblance of income and power redistribution now made less
possible by the state getting out of, except in one instance, the business of
providing health care directly.

A representative of one of the
entities that brought the suit, the American Federation of StateCounty & Municipal Employees union,
foolishly criticized the entire project that has seen off nine of the state’s
former charity hospitals from state administration, decrying how the closing
was an example of the “atrocities” of the Gov. Bobby
Jindal Administration – even though in general the switchover is estimate
on average annually to
save many tens of millions of dollars and has
expanded services to the indigent. With that line of argument invalidated,
this reveals the only real interest of AFSCME here as trying to preserve as
many state jobs as possible to increase its influence, regardless of how many
taxpayer dollars are wasted and services are reduced.

Then there’s the head of the
organizing group, who moaned that former patients are somehow reluctant to go
to the private providers, being that they are poor and uneducated so “they
don’t feel welcome. They’re afraid. They don’t know what to expect.” Not only
does this sentiment insult those who are Medicaid clients (the large majority
of which are children in any event), but it also argues they’ve never made a
trips to dentists’ offices, as Medicaid seldom pays for dental services and
almost all of those providers are private. And how can a huge government
installation that forced you wait interminably for care make anybody feel
welcome or unafraid?

But perhaps the most boneheaded remarks
of them all, because he ought to know better, came from the man whose name is
becoming inseparable from lamebrain stunts, Rep. Vance McAllister. As the area is
tucked in the southwest corner of the Republican’s district and he’s running
for reelection in wake of a sex scandal that he previously said would preclude him
from trying to win a full term, McAllister figured he ought to show up and talk
about an issue over which has nothing to do with his job in Washington.

He took the closure as an issue
as an opportunity to stump for expansion of Medicaid in Louisiana – again, a
state-level issue over which he has no authority – laying down the same rap
about how the state ought to go for it, and as predictably not
mentioning that it would cost state taxpayers at least half a billion extra
dollars over the next decade while likely causing worse outcomes than if the
state does not expand while continuing it system of reimbursement for
uncompensated care to providers. Now that a Democrat has entered the contest,
he must think he can ignore the facts and sprint to the left in order to win
enough votes to make the runoff.

Problem is, voters also tend to
appreciate Members of Congress who aren’t entirely ignorant about the very
programs at which they throw trillions of dollars, with that remark putting him
into difficulty on this account when he said it was “irrational” not to look “to
take that money [that instead] allows that money to go to other states, and
it’s money that we paid ….” After several months presumably on the job,
McAlliiter should have learned by now that Medicaid money comes only to the
state if it spends some of its own money as a matching grant. There’s not a
pool of it out there that if Louisiana doesn’t claim then some other state
gets. And it’s stupidity to think, just because other states expanded Medicaid
thereby forcing Louisianans and all other states’ taxpayers to pay more federal
taxes and/or to run up more federal debt and/or to reduce federal services to
pay for it, that the way to get back at them is to make Louisianans pay still
more for less by expanding Medicaid in retaliation.

It’s bad enough that McAllister
is a dunce, but worse that he falls back on this lie to try to pander for
votes. And it had nothing to do with the closure, which even if the Louisiana
Supreme Court does find that the Senate committee meeting where the resolution
to do that passed did not give 48 hours’ notice, that horse has left the barn. The
state could hire a security guard to prowl the property for a few months and
delay disposing parts of it until the Legislature meets and reaffirms the
closing, but it never will reopen as a publicly-run provider of medical
services again – no matter what those elements do that want to keep it open first
and foremost to empower their special interests and political agendas at the
expense of improving health care delivery and efficiency in the state.

2 comments:

“they don’t feel welcome. They’re afraid. They don’t know what to expect.” This is true!

Low-income families do not feel welcomed or respected in many areas of Louisiana because of the unprofessional comments and attitudes of conservative physicians.

If you could open your heart enough to accept their reality and help your fellow conservatives tone down the rhetoric, these low-income families would feel safer and more welcomed in local offices. For example, encourage conservative doctors and nurses to refrain from calling their sons "thugs," and trash-talking Obama in front of them.

"And how can a huge government installation that forced you wait (sic) interminably for care make anybody feel welcome or unafraid?"

That's a pretty pathetic attempt shift blame right there. It's not even true that this government institution forces everyone to wait interminably -- that's a completely subjective observation, as some wait, some don't, and those who do wait are not "forced" to do so and some wait shorter or longer than others -- and then you make it worse by suggesting that waiting for care is the sole thing that makes people unwelcome, which is just flat-out untrue.

Poor or undereducated Medicaid patients who report feeling unwelcome or afraid usually notice their conservative Republican doctor looking down their nose at them, displaying barely concealed disgust for a Medicaid patient who might have tattoos and a cell phone, or other things that conservatives such as yourself consider luxuries that only should be had by those you personally deem have worked hard enough, such as those you show utter contempt for in your defense of Jindal's failed tax swap plan, which betrays not only an "utter lack of logic," as you would say, but also lays bare your disgust and prejudices against people who you think don't work for a living and are "moochers":

Another example is this verified-true letter to the editor from a Mississippi doctor, who rails about his contempt for the poor people he has to treat, completely discounting that Medicaid dollars provide about 60% of his salary, and that his judgmental assumptions about the patients he treats only prove he has no way of knowing the patient's personal history or how they wound up on Medicaid, and he doesn't think twice about spewing hatred toward his patients who have tattoos, tennis shoes, and cell phones, which he thinks they don't deserve because he's so much smarter and works so much harder -- a sentiment you appear to express daily on your little blog:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/starner.asp

The feigned piousness and phony compassion conservatives tend to show is only a mask for their hatred of the poor, a most un-Christian sentiment coming from those defending what is currently called "religious freedom," otherwise known as your right to hate those less fortunate or different than yourselves.

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